And Now for Some Sci-Fi...
I'm excited to share a short story by Monya Baker in today's Unfit to Print. Take a 10-minute break and escape into another world.
A little something different for you in today’s Unfit to Print: a short story by friend and fellow writer, Monya Baker. Titled A Campaign for Slower Living, this short is the first piece of fiction to appear in Unfit to Print since launching this little endeavor last March, and I couldn’t be happier that it’s sci-fi. Why? Well, to quote Ursula K. Le Guin from the introduction to her novel, The Left Hand of Darkness: sci-fi is like a thought experiment, and “the purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future…but to describe reality, the present world.” In that regard, sci-fi can sometimes feel depressing—especially at times like now, when so many things “in the real world” are heavy and deadly. But if sci-fi can show us how things really are, and leave us with a desire to do things differently—then it does the opposite of depress. It inspires us. Read on below for a note from the author, followed by the short story, A Campaign for Slower Living.
I wrote this piece because I was thinking about inequity and privilege. At the same time I found myself constantly starved for time. I knew that if someone gave me the chance to get more done in a weekend even if it shortened my life, I’d probably take it. And, in the interest of saving time, I thought I’d put a story I’m fond of into an outlet I’m fond of.
A Campaign for Slower Living
Enrico Mafrez stood in the wings adjusting his trademark fedora. It had lately acquired the advantage of hiding gray hair.
The VRGrid snapped on and he strode onto the stage. Three million Zoomers were online plus a few hundred distanced nonVR attendees to create some sort of buzz. Every single one of them knew his story already. Yet they would promise to vote, to write politicians, to FiMo and Zoonate and Paymail. His narrative was hardly embellished, and it worked every time.
“Let me tell you about two brothers,” he began. The running chat projected on the curtain began filling up with slogans. “Death to hypertime. Wiraction! NoMoreEnzos.” His team’s filters would remove anything original or distracting.
A series of holograms showed identical twins growing up side by side, as alike as mass-produced toys. Differences appear on their 14th birthday, when one has a two-inch scar on his neck. Four birthdays later, crow’s feet claw around one’s eyes while the other’s skin stays firm. One brother’s hair stays black while the other’s thins and grays. Finally one brother, young and vigorous, slumps beside a cremation urn.
“He is with us now,” Enrico said, pulling the vial from his shirt. “I keep his ashes by my heart.”
The audiences were like children listening to bedtime stories, lapping it up, no changes allowed. He just needed to build up enough enthusiasts to get the attention of actual decision-makers. The curtain flashed instachat donation codes.
Enrico paced through the history lesson. Hypertime technology began as a side project of what was then an offshoot of the obscure subfield of chronodynamics. The quantum physiologists first reported their results in the early part of this century. When special cages blasted mice with L’Engle radiation, the mice disappeared. High-speed imaging sensors showed furry blurs. Wheels spun faster than any mouse could run. The mice died young but looked old, their ages inversely correlated with radiation exposure. The lay press’s explanation, that hypertime causes the heart to pound out its allotted number of beats faster, making for a quicker, shorter life, isn’t technically correct, but the gist is right.
After a few gee-whiz news videos, the trick fell off the radar. It couldn’t be made to work on guinea pigs, dogs, or even rats. The explanation seemed both plausible and intractable: body mass was the limiting factor. Further applications were deemed so unlikely that the handful of bioethicists applying for funds to study implications were scorned.
But scientists soldiered on. Someone figured out how to boost the radiation a cage put out. Their calculations showed that amplifiers placed throughout the body should let the radiation work its magic in large animals. They didn’t understand why those attempts didn’t work. Then, quietly, came the breakthrough: age mattered. Except for mice with their never-shortening telomeres, the physio-technology had to be installed before puberty.
Factories in lands with lax labor laws were the first to see the potential. Didn’t nations have the sovereign right to boost worker productivity? And what politician or business manager would endanger reliable manufacture of cheaply priced goods and services? Parents saw the advantage. In a world where children already die fast, why not let them do so in a temperature-controlled lab factory instead of a cruel mine, or brothel? Amplifiers installed in the neck, torso, hip, and thigh produced the speediest workers in the assembly line; early adopters got higher wages. The operation had a side benefit – the scars showed immediately who was who. Notched-neck laborers; smooth necked managers.
Inevitably, hypertiming reached the developed world. Some parents saved for college; others to get their kids notched for lab factory work. When facilities shrunk to the size of individual desks, the elite moved swiftly to protect their children. University boards universally declared that no one equipped for hypertime could be admitted to their institutions.
No one made much fuss about discrimination. Parents without college degrees already knew that their children weren’t destined for higher education. And there were three levels of oversight. The subject, a guardian, and a teacher all had to approve. Sure, teachers might have an incentive to have the least rewarding students siphoned out of their classrooms by age 14, but wasn’t that the point?
Soon unhypertimed plus uneducated equaled unemployable, a sure ticket for institutionalization. Social activists launched outreach programs so at-risk youth would not miss the window of opportunity; governments that failed to promote the operation would deny people their dignity, their capacity for self-reliance.
The notched and un-notched worlds synchronized. The educated elite became accustomed to being surrounded by nearly invisible, presumably happy, servants. Hypertracks were installed in personal homes, restaurants, hair salons. Only at the most traditional (and expensive) establishments, would the waiters become fully visible, doffing their hyping-caps at the beginning and end of meals, wishing diners bon appétit and thanking them for their business.
Then came the unlikely series of individual mishaps that culminated in this social movement: a notch-necked mother died leaving her twins, Enzo and Enrico in care of the state and each other. A harried surgeon remembered he’s already completed the hypertime operation for government ward E. Mafrez and moved on to the next procedure. A teacher directs a confused, smooth-necked teen out of the line for worker applications and into her classroom. The teen becomes a scientist, and then an activist. One who made crowds remember what the world could be. Enrico, clad in his wool fedora, satin tie, and leather riding boots, took a bow. Some nonVR attendees raised their eyes from their tablets and whooped as engagement goals were met. Enrico moved into the final stretch.
“Today the notched and un-notched mingle at my rallies. There are romances that shock and mystify your parents. Some of you have blocked access to hypertime facilities. You’ve held ‘slow-ins’ in public squares. Not long ago, smooth-necked people were surprised that notch-necked had retained the right to vote. Now two notched people have been elected in Congress. One is the mayor of Camden.”
“We now have laws that restrict the number of hours workers can spend in hypertime; public universities have opened their doors to the notched. I’ve heard the notched have acquired a kind of glamour.” Enrico waited for the whoops, then held his brother’s vial in front of him and waited for the cheers to fade into guilty, motivated silence.
“But I do not see progress. I see failure!”
Enrico paced the stage. “Those who control the means of production have convinced the masses that hypertime is freedom. That it shouldn’t be banned but regulated. That we should place our trust in those who understand market demands.” Boos erupted; the curtain filled with pulsing thumbs-down emo-animes. Time to bring this to a close.
“L’Engle radiation should be outlawed. All equipment should be destroyed. There must be harsh penalties for anyone maintaining hypertime facilities. Or all humanity will tumble down into fast-living. Do what would have saved Enzo! Save yourself!”
Enrico walked off the stage and checked the chat on the curtain. They had filtered out the free emo-animes by now, only the digital goods displayed—blue fireworks, 80s videogame icons, smiling Oprah. This would let Enrico stretch his campaign budget out a few months, win a couple meetings with more powerful influencers. All that effort—answering emails at all hours, responding to requests personally—it was going to matter. Life and the economy would slow.
Enrico was about to run back on for his ovation when he felt a tingling in his arms and a vise grip his chest; he fell to the ground with a thud. His fedora clanked beside him. In his last moments, he grasped the eventuality he should have foreseen; he had done too little to hide his technology to hypertime without amplifiers, without hyping tracks, no notching required. What might have been obliterated if public, would become ubiquitous in secret. His legacy would be a hypertime more entrenched in society than information technology. Advertisements would promise to offer lethal miracles to help the un-notched meet deadlines even before his funeral. It was all in the hat.
—MB
Monya Baker is a professional developmental editor for scientists, a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook (Da Capo Lifelong Books), and a member of the National Association of Science Writers and the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Her articles have appeared in the Economist, Nature, New Scientist, Slate, Wired, and elsewhere. Her novel-in-progress, That They Might Have Joy, won first place in the 2021 Mendocino County Writers’ Conference Contest. Follow @Monya_PostMo on Twitter.